Your relationship with your community is what makes YouTube unique. Whether your fans are Nerdfighters or Mirfandas, they’ve created a close-knit bond with you and your content. We realize that comments play a key role in growing this connection and we’re dedicated to making your conversations with your community easier and more personal. We've been listening to your feedback and we’re excited to roll out new comment features, including:

Pinned comments: promote a specific comment by pinning it to the top of your feed. This lets you highlight great engagement from your fans or share information with your audience.

Creator hearts: show some love by giving a heart to your favorite comments. This is a new and easy way to acknowledge comments from your community.

Creator usernames: when you comment on your channel, your username will appear under the text with a pop of color around it so your viewers can easily tell that the comment is coming from you. If you are a verified creator, you will still have a verification checkmark appear beside your name.

We also want to continue to help you shape the tone of your conversations on YouTube. Here’s a refresher on some existing tools along with a new beta feature we’re launching in the coming months.

Choose moderators:Earlier this year, we launched a new comment feature that lets you delegate moderation, giving people you trust the ability to remove public comments from your videos.

Blacklist words and phrases: You may have comments with certain words or phrases held for your review and approval before being published.

Hold potentially inappropriate comments for review: We’re introducing a new beta feature that allows you to hold potentially inappropriate comments for review. If you choose to opt-in, comments identified by our algorithm will be held and you have the final decision whether to approve, hide, or report these comments. We recognize that the algorithms will not always be accurate: the beta feature may hold some comments you deem fine for approval, or may not catch comments you’d like to hold and remove. When you review comments, the system will take that feedback into account and get better at identifying the types of comments to hold for review. If you’d like to try this out, submit your channel information here.

We’re excited to see how you use these features to grow stronger communities and have more constructive conversations in your comment sections.

Update, 11/1/2016: In April, we announced that we’ve been developing a new solution that allows your videos to earn revenue while a Content ID claim is being disputed. We’re excited to share that this is now available to all creators in the YouTube Partner Program! Here is a refresher on how this works: If both you and the Content ID claimant want to monetize your video, we will continue to run ads against it and hold those funds separately while the dispute is resolved.

While you can dispute a Content ID claim at any time, the vast majority of disputes are made within the first 5 days of a claim being placed on your videos. Our new system is designed accordingly: If you choose to dispute a claim within the first 5 days of receiving it, we will hold revenue from the day the Content ID claim was placed. If you choose to dispute a Content ID claim after 5 days of the original claim, we will start holding the revenue on the date the dispute is made. Read more about how this works here.

As always, thanks to everyone for sharing feedback about our copyright processes. We’re always working to improve our systems, with the goal of empowering creators with the freedom of opportunity to build a business and succeed on your own terms.

-David Rosenstein, Content ID Product Manager

Original post from 4/28/16:

At YouTube, one of our core values is a belief in the freedom of opportunity. We believe anyone should have the opportunity to earn money from the videos they create and turn their channels into successful businesses. That’s why we opened up the YouTube Partner Program nine years ago and why we remain the only platform where anyone with an idea and a camera can turn their videos into full time jobs.

We understand just how important revenue is to our creator community, and we’ve been listening closely to concerns about the loss of monetization during the Content ID dispute process. Currently videos that are claimed and disputed don’t earn revenue for anyone, which is an especially frustrating experience for creators if that claim ends up being incorrect while a video racks up views in its first few days. Today, we’re announcing a major step to help fix that frustrating experience. We’re developing a new solution that will allow videos to earn revenue while a Content ID claim is being disputed. Here’s how it will work: when both a creator and someone making a claim choose to monetize a video, we will continue to run ads on that video and hold the resulting revenue separately. Once the Content ID claim or dispute is resolved, we’ll pay out that revenue to the appropriate party. We’re working on this new system now and hope to roll it out to all YouTube partners in the coming months. Here’s a closer look at how it’ll work once it’s live:

We strongly believe in fair use and believe that this improvement to Content ID will make a real difference. In addition to our work on the Content ID dispute process, we’re also paying close attention to creators’ concerns about copyright claims on videos they believe may be fair use. We want to help both the YouTube community and copyright owners alike better understand what fair use looks like online, which is why we launched our fair use protection program last year and recently introduced new Help Center pages on this topic.

Even though Content ID claims are disputed less than 1% of the time, we agree that this process could be better. Making sure our Content ID tools are being used properly is deeply important to us, so we’ve built a dedicated team to monitor this. Using a combination of algorithms and manual review, this team has resolved millions of invalid claims in the last year alone, and acted on millions more before they impacted creators. The team also restricts feature access and even terminates a partner’s access to Content ID tools if we find they are repeatedly abusing these tools.We will continue to invest in both people and technology to make sure that Content ID keeps working for creators and rightsholders. We want to thank everyone who’s shared their concerns about unintended effects from Content ID claims. It’s allowed us to create a better system for everyone and we hope to share more updates soon. David Rosenstein, Content ID Group Product Manager, recently watched “Coachella VR 360 – Week 1 Sunday Highlights”

Your best videos leave your fans hungry for more. They can be a great hook for viewers to discover more of your work, find out more about who you are or go deeper into the topics you cover. That’s why we’re excited to launch End Screens, a new mobile-friendly tool that lets you engage viewers right as your video finishes and encourages them to watch more on their devices.

How do they work? In the last 5-20 seconds of your videos, you can now choose to show hard-to-miss thumbnail overlays that prompt viewers to watch your other videos, subscribe to your channel, visit collaborators’ channels, and more. Currently, many creators use Annotations, a desktop-only tool that allows you to add clickable links to your videos, to manually create end screens. This will no longer be necessary, as the new End Screens are not only easier to create, but also allow you to reach more viewers on desktop and mobile. After testing End Screens with a number of creators, we’ve incorporated feedback to make the tool work even better. We couldn’t be happier to make it available to every creator on YouTube.
So how will you use End Screens? We can’t wait to see the ideas you come up with.

YouTube creators are among the most influential voices in media today. Since brands increasingly recognize the value of the connection creators have with their fans around the world, they are investing in collaborations to reach viewers in interesting and authentic ways. At the same time, viewers appreciate transparency when brands and creators collaborate on paid promotions such as product placements, sponsorships or endorsements.

While there are a variety of ways creators can disclose paid promotions, today we are launching a new, optional video feature that adds visible text on the video for the first few seconds a viewer watches, informing viewers of a paid promotion. Creators can also choose to add this text disclosure to any existing video without losing their view count or other video metrics.

We’re excited to provide this feature in response to requests for an easy-to-use notification, but since there is no global disclosure standard, creators and brands should check and follow applicable laws as they may vary greatly by region.

We’ve always asked creators to notify YouTube as well when a video contains paid promotion by checking the “video contains paid promotion” box in their Video Manager. We do this to remove the video from the YouTube Kids app in line with our existing policies, and we may replace the ad served with one that does not conflict with the promoted brand partner.

What’s it like winning YouTube NextUp? Check out what the latest NextUp London class experienced in the video below:

Channels selected to join the NextUp class of 2016 are eligible to receive:

A $2,500 voucher for production equipment (or local equivalent) to help you make your video dreams a reality.

A spot at a week-long creator camp at YouTube Spaces around the world. You’ll team up with production experts to harness new techniques in camera, lighting, and sound and receive coaching from YouTube Partnerships team on how to grow your audience.

Mentorship by YouTube NextUp grads, plus the opportunity to meet and work with other fast-rising creators.

To see if you’re qualified to enter the YouTube NextUp contest and check out all the creators in the NextUp class of 2016, visit youtube.com/nextup.

Like a lot of creators out there, you’re busy. From shooting to traveling, taking meetings, or a little time off, you’re on the move. The latest version of the Creator Studio app makes it faster and easier to manage your channel on the go. With new features to help you track and break down analytics, keep in touch with your community, and manage your channel, you can stay on top of it all, 24/7.

Turn your stats into actions

Not a numbers whizz? No worries! We did all the heavy lifting, so you don’t have to. The latest advances in YouTube Analytics are now part of the Creator Studio app. Our data cards provide simple and easy ways to understand your channel stats and suggest ways you can grow your channel. You’ll also get links to education resources based on your channel needs to help you bolster your skills.

Did one of your videos experience a sudden spike in views while you were out? With our new insights, you’ll receive a personalized message when a significant event happens on your channel and tips on how to make the most of what’s happening on your channel.

Here to help

These latest analytics updates to the Creator Studio app are all part of our continuing efforts to build better tools aimed at helping you grow. And if you still need answers to your YouTube questions, we’ve made it super simple to contact a real person here at YouTube. Following the announcement of increased support for every creator that is part of the YouTube Partner program, we’ve added a new way to email the YouTube support team directly from the app.

Your bond with your viewers is deep. You've grown up together, laughed together, and done incredible things together, from shifting attitudes about gay rights to volunteering millions of dollars toward important charitable causes. Today, we’re introducing a beta version of a new product to help strengthen the bond between you and your viewers, called YouTube Community.The brand new Community tab on your YouTube channel gives you a new, simple way to engage with your viewers and express yourself beyond video. Now you can do things like text, live videos, images, animated GIFs and more, giving you easier, lightweight ways to engage with your fans more often in between uploads, in real time. Viewers will be able to see your posts in the Subscriptions feed on their phones. They can also opt into getting a notification anytime you post.

Community is a special release for us because it represents the deepest product collaboration we've ever done with creators like you. We started by inviting creators in early to develop, in partnership with us, the tools they wanted to better engage with their fans.

As creators, your ideas and feedback shape our platform, inspire new features, and help us decide what to prioritize. It's you who ultimately build YouTube and as the new Community product shows, together, we make YouTube better for everyone.